Keynote Addresses and Invited Talk

Keynote Speeches

8th Sepember, 2010 - Grammatical  Inference  in  Bio-Inspired Computing

 Keynote Speech: DNA computing and membrane computing are two fast emerging areas ofrecent research of Bio-Inspired computing. The concepts of DNA splicingsystems involving new operation of splicing of strings and P Systemsbased on the evolution of objects in a membrane structure are theoutcomes of the studies in these areas. These systems have beenextensively investigated by different researchers . On the other hand,Grammatical  Inference deals with the problem of identification ofstructures from large sets of data and has applications in DNA sequenceanalysis and Bio-Informatics . Identifying DNA splicing systems fromexamples and P rules from membrane structures are interesting studiesfound in the literature . In this talk , we review the inductiveinference of structures in natural computing and exhibit potentialapplications of formal languages and automata  in this field. 

 Profile: Professor D.G. Thomas is a Professor ofMathematics at Madras Christian College (MCC), Chennai, India.He obtained his Ph.D.  from the University of Madras in 1996. His areas of research includeFormal Languages, Automata Theory, Picture and Graph Grammars, Image Analysis, GrammaticalInference, Cryptosystems, DNA Computing and Membrane Computing. He is very wellpublished and has more than 100 research papers published in internationaljournals of repute/ Lecture Notes in Computer Science/ proceedings ofconferences. Two students earned their Ph.D. under his supervision; other twostudents have submitted their Ph.D. thesis and four more are in progress. Hewas a co-investigator of two international projects: "Automata, InfiniteWords and Codes" with the Universityof Bordeaux I, France (during 1997- 2000) and “Graphs,Logic and Languages" with the University of Reunion, France (during2000-2002). He has been a Visiting Professor of the I3S Laboratory and ESSI,Sophia Antipolis, University of NICE, France during May-June 2000. He has beenon the Program Committee of a number of international conferences including INDOCRYPT2004 (Chennai, India)and CompIMAGE 2010 (New York,USA). He is aco-editor of the book entitled “Cryptography, Automata and Learning Theory"(Narosa, Plc.). He is a member of the Indian Association for Research inComputing Science (IARCS) and the Cryptology Research Society of India (CRSI).He is a reviewer for the American Mathematical Reviews.

9th Sepember, 2010 - Biologically-Inspired Massively-Parallel Architectures - computing beyond a million processors

Keynote Speech:  The SpiNNaker project aims to develop parallel computer systems with more than a million embedded processors. The goal of the project is to support large-scale simulations of systems of spiking neurons in biological real time, an application that is highly parallel but also places very high loads on the communication infrastructure due to the very high connectivity of biological neurons. The design of the machine is very much influenced by the biological application it is intended to support, which has a lot to teach us about how we might build more efficient, fault-tolerant parallel computers in the future.

Profile: Professor Steve Furber CBE FRS FREng is the ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. He received his BA degree in Mathematics in 1974 and his PhD in Aerodynamics in 1980 from the University of Cambridge, England. From 1980 to 1990 he worked in the hardware development group within the R&D department at Acorn Computers Ltd, and was a principal designer of the BBC Microcomputer and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor. Upon moving to the University of Manchester in 1990 he established the Amulet research group which has interests in asynchronous logic design and power-efficient computing, and which merged with the Parallel Architectures and Languages group in 2000 to form the Advanced Processor Technologies group.
Steve was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal in 2003. He held a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award from 2004 to 2009. He was awarded the IET Faraday Medal in 2007 and a CBE in 2008. He was a 2010 Millenium Technology Prize Laureate, and was awarded an Honorary DSc by the University of Edinburgh on June 28 2010.

Invited Talk 

 10th Sepember, 2010 - New Variants of Particle Swarm Optimization

Invited Talk: Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is one of the most effective natural computing paradigms with reduced memory requirement, computationally effective and easier to implement, that has emerged in the last decade. Based on the simulation of the behavior of a group of birds or a school of fish looking for food, it has undergone many changes since its introduction. As researchers have learned about the technique, they have derived new versions, developed new applications, and published theoretical studies of the effects of the various parameters and aspects of the algorithm.
This talk describes the numerous variants of PSO developed at my group at Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India with a view to improve the efficiency and reliability of PSO. The focus is three new PSOs for determining the global optimal solution of unconstrained and constrained nonlinear continuous optimization problems. They are tested on standard benchmark problems.  The extensive numerical and graphical results will be discussed and the supremacy of these algorithms will be exhibited.  

 Profile: Dr. Kusum Deep, is an Associate Professor, with the Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India. She earned her PhD from IIT Roorkee in 1988. A M.Phil Gold Medalist, she holds UGC National Merit Scholarship, UGC National Education Test Scholarship and International Bursary  funded by Commission of European Communities, Brussels. She was awarded the Khosala Research Award in 1991, UGC Career Award in 2002, Starred Performer of IIT – Roorkee Faculty continuously from 2001 to 2005, best technical paper, Railway Bulletin of Indian Railways for 2005, special facilitation in memory of late Prof. M. C. Puri during 40th Convention of Operations Research Society of India held at New Delhi in 2007.  Six students have been awarded PhD under her supervision and six more are in progress. She has co-authored a book entitled "Optimization Techniques" by New Age Publishers New Delhi in 2009 with an International edition by New Age Science, UK. She has more than 40 research publications in refereed International Journals and more than 70 research papers in International / National Conferences. She is on the editorial board of many International and National Journals. She is a Senior Member of Operations Research Society of India, IEEE,, Indian Mathematical Society and Indian Society of Industrial Mathematics. Her area of specialization is numerical optimization and their applications to engineering. Currently she is working on Evolutionary Computations, particularly, Genetic Algorithms, Memetic Algorithms, Particle Swarm Optimization and their applications to solve real life problems.